The election to decide the President of the United States, also known as the POTUS, was completed on Tuesday, with the exception of Florida which can’t ever seem to do these things in a timely manner. Depending on who your candidate was, you are either in a state of elation or sheer demoralization (I suppose you could be blasé if you voted for a third party candidate and knew you had no shot at winning to begin with). But regardless of who you voted for to become the next POTUS, something we can all agree on (besides supporting the cocktail party) is that voting is an easy process (in theory) made more complicated by the various wizardry and gadgetry that is used to count your vote. Much like the VCR (everyone reading this is old enough to remember them, right?) that always blinked 12:00 because the user couldn’t figure out how to set the time, voting technology throughout history has been convoluted and open to all sorts of shenanigans that would make a TV political pundit’s head explode. To honor the patriots who made our process of democracy more interesting, here are some of our favorite voting patent documents.

A process developed to make voting easier and more secure has one fatal flaw, a worm drive (43; Fig. 2 — ostensibly a Write Once Read Many drive, I still wouldn’t want worms crawling around in my system). Hackers can’t believe their luck and the cast of the Jersey Shore are voted into the White House on their pro-steroids policy. Lance Armstrong is immediately given a reprieve. What’s that? Too soon? Sorry!

Possibly the greatest invention in voting is the giant handle that allows you to register your votes in the old-timey voting booths.

The gears weren’t properly lubricated and you snapped the handle off…Sorry!

Next time: Danny runs for office after mastering The Apology, a political mainstay. He is defeated in a landslide, receiving no votes, not even voting for himself.

Find previous writings and musings from the off-kilter Danny Rooney here.
This post was contributed by Registered Patent Agent Dan Wolka and edited by Chris Jagalla. The Intellogist blog is provided for free by Intellogist’s parent company, Landon IP, a major provider of patent search, technical translation, and information services.